2012-02-05

Biding Time

Signs like this ("If you do not help us, we will be killed") really get me. I know there are perfectly innocent Syrians out there wanting their freedom, and I know we have the military power to provide it.

But the same was true of Iraq in 1991. There were reasons why we could not help the Iraqis obtain their freedom at that time. (Mind you there was the additional factor that back then there shouldn't have been the naive call for the Iraqis to stage a glorious revolution). In Iraq there was eventually an opportunity to help the Iraqi people, and that opportunity was seized in 2003.

I think we're looking at the same situation in Syria. We're not going to get UN approval for the action, so we need to act unilaterally. But that will piss off Russia and it will probably prevent supplies from reaching Afghanistan. So just like Iraq, I think the action to free people needs to be delayed until 2014 when our troops are out of Afghanistan and all we need to do is provide funding for the ANA.

That means that the Syrian uprising will probably have petered out by then, there will be no Free Syrian Army operating inside Syria, and no territory controlled by the opposition. So out of the blue the Western militaries can launch a Syrian campaign. Ground forces will be required due to the lack of opposition forces to aid. People will be asking why now, and why not xyz country instead. The reason why now is because that's when the geostrategic opportunity arose. As I have mentioned before, technically the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq were premature. We hadn't secured the Baltic states in NATO at that point (that didn't happen until 2004). 9/11 brought the schedule forward. And why Syria? Because the government is an enemy of the free world. Once again it makes geostrategic sense to attack enemy governments first.

In many ways Syria is a rerun of Iraq. When people understand the justification for going into Syria without UN approval, they will understand why Iraq was done the same way, and the Iraq war can be post-justified. The challenge is to bring the general public up to the same intellectual understanding of the neocons. Societal change is required.

It is tragic that Syrians have put their lives on the lines for freedom, reaching the point of no return, and we're not there to support them. But this is the problem with geostrategy. Until we find a way to change Russian society, we are forced to take cold hard calculated measures to strip Russia of its despotic allies. We've had an extremely good run getting almost all of Europe into the NATO umbrella. Geostrategically Syria is not that important, but we do certainly want to mop up all these enemy dictators regardless.

It would be nice to be able to give some advice to would-be revolutionaries. ie when to rise up that coincides with the geostrategic situation. But unfortunately war is too unpredictable in that regard. It's impossible to know how many people will defect. In Tunisia and Egypt there were military defections at the highest level. In Libya and Syria that did not happen and a tough slog was required. But revolutionaries can't know that in advance.

Geostrategically I think Iran is a better option at the moment. The scary weapons provide better justification for taking unilateral action, and Russia doesn't have military facilities there so its nose is going to be less out of joint. Also it will open up a gateway to Afghanistan so that our troops can be supplied without needing Russia.

So Iran then Syria would be the way to go I think. Of course numbnuts will be saying that we're doing Iran because it has more oil, but that's why numbnuts are called numbnuts. It's actually calculated geostrategy.